Coaches Corner v.02.23.2023
Guest writer and Coach Floyd Jerkins addresses behavioral sales metrics for coaching equipment industry sales teams for Coaches Corner v.02.23.2023.
Every dealership organization is at a different place in time with the diagnosis of their sales teams and processes. The size of complex and level of operational sophistication are factors. Many times, it’s a location issue more than overall company-wide so that requires custom solutions. So, maybe this article is timely and you’re ready to look deeper into how to make real progress in the sales department.
Professional Sales Management and Salespeople
Great salespeople are great salespeople, and in the equipment industry it’s no different than other industries. There are particular aspects unique to every industry due to a product’s life cycle, style of customers and personalities, buying patterns, and market conditions. And the best salespeople know they have to understand these industry specific characteristics to succeed, but there is more. When you learn to sell, you can sell anything. Yea, I know, I know, but it’s true.
Being a professional sales manager or salesperson in the equipment industry isn’t for everyone. There are real superstars doing this work every day and many of them make it look easy. They have a natural and personal approach that gets the job done. Others have tried and failed. Many linger on with average performance. Yet, owners who sell often do not follow the system they expect their salespeople to follow or they have a perceived top producer that no one can touch.
There are typically high and low performers when you have a large sales team. Improving the performance metrics of sales managers and salespeople can be challenging to establish what particular actions need to be taken.
Building a sales team of all superstars is a great plan, but not always realistic or practical. In my experience, sales management and sales teams usually have a mixture of age and talent with varying skill sets and competency levels.
A Sales Managers Rally Cry – To Sell More, Talk to More People
To sell more, talking to more people always seems to be at the top of the list of things to do. Still, if a salesperson talks to a lot of people and prices a lot of people but doesn’t have a good measured closing ratio, it makes me wonder how effective they are and whether they should be allowed to keep talking to your customers. When a sales manager influences the sales team with a whip and chain or talks more about the problems than the solutions, is that the most effective leadership style to use in today’s business climate? I don’t think so.
The traditional metrics for sales success include new and used margins, sales volume, new and used turns, and a mixture of others. To be an excellent asset manager, you must know these metrics and how to positively influence their outcomes.
Performance Metrics Created Before & After the Sale
Like many traditional metrics, margins, turns, and other sales department indicators are created after a unit is sold. The efficiency of your booking and accounting practices determines when the sale appears in a statement. That could be anywhere from one week to sixty days past when the actual sale was made. Once the numbers are current, you can assess what’s going on. If you’ve followed my articles about this, you know where I am headed.
Let me ask a few questions:
- Who do you make more money on, a repeat customer or a customer who has never done business with you or your company before?
- Who do you have the most fun working with, a repeat customer or someone who has never done business with you before?
- Who do you sell in less time, someone you don’t know or a customer who’s bought from you before?
Perhaps you took a few seconds and thought about your answers. I appreciate the effort. Now, consider your answers and what you know and don’t know.
“The goal is to coach performance in the areas that help salespeople become more effective with real-time data. Becoming more effective in sales and marketing your business requires a deep understanding of your customer base so you can focus the sales and marketing team on what matters the most.”
Behavioral Customer Segmentation
The old saying is you can’t improve something unless you measure it. One of the first principles of process improvement is as a process evolves make sure you are measuring the right things.
You probably already know the customer by machine or product sold, sales volume, and parts and service sales, so tracking this kind of customer segmentation can reveal even more real time data. Even a basic CRM system can track these customer categories.
Total Customers
Customer Categories
New Customer– This customer has never been to, called, or emailed your business before.
Repeat Customer– This is a customer who has bought from you before. Many companies have “orphan owners.”
Referral Customer– This is a customer who another customer referred to your business or the salesperson.
New Business– This customer is someone you meet at the gas station or a social event. A brief conversation in almost any social situation generates new leads.
The sale is the end result of all the activities performed by a salesperson. By coaching performance on these sales activities that happen before and during the sales process, we can naturally increase a salespersons effectiveness.
When you measure these you learn a lot about how your sales mix is made up, how effective sales and front-line people are in each category, and even how well your marketing is doing. It also speeds up the learning curves. If you don’t know these, you are at the end of the sales cycle making decisions. When you are looking at unit sales, you are best guessing how effective your sales and marketing efforts are.
A Behavioral Sales Mix- BSM
Each salesperson should log every Customer Contact interaction each day. To get buy-in, a sales manager communicates with the sales team to create the “rules of logging” they’ll follow. For example, if the salesperson is at the parts counter talking with Joe Customer and he asks how much that used machine is, that should be logged. Each person inputting into the system should understand what the code means when they log it. GIGO- garbage in, garbage out.
Salespeople shouldn’t be allowed to post at their discretion, and that’s part of the rules created in the early stages of implementation. You don’t allow your accounting staff to post credits however they like, nor do you allow technicians not to record their time. Salespeople should be required to a certain standard of recording their day-to-day activities. Its good business.
It’s essential to know how many Closes to Face-to-Face Contacts there are in the same time period. This establishes one of the fundamental Closing Ratios for performance improvement.
By tracking these customer categories and how many face-to-face contacts by salesperson and how many closes by salesperson, you are ready to create a new view of your sales mix. Stay tuned, next month’s article will be on the analysis of these metrics.
Did you enjoy this blog? Read more great blog posts here.
For our course lists, please click here.
Belonging is good for business and benefits the bottom line!
Belonging is good for business and benefits the bottom line!
Guest writer Sonya Law brings back our human resources perspective with “Belonging is good for business and benefits the bottom line!”
According to Harvard Business Review: “If workers feel like they belong, companies reap substantial bottom-line benefits.”
The bottom-line benefits are:
Raising questions?
Creating a Sense of belonging has been given more attention, post pandemic, because People are:
How do you create a sense of belonging:
Creating a sense of belonging helps you to hold on to your Brightest & Best TALENT!
Develops cultural awareness – focusing on what employees are telling you in your employee survey, will guide your next steps!
A sense of belonging creates unintended benefits:
“A sense of belonging helps create resilience and ‘people stickiness’ to the organisation of your high potentials!!”
‘Take care of your people and they will take care of your business.’
Did you enjoy this blog? Read more great blog posts here.
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What’s More Beneficial, AI, or Stakeholder Analysis?
What’s More Beneficial, AI, or Stakeholder Analysis?
Guest writer Sara Hanks continues the conversations about widely accessible artificial intelligence in this week’s blog post: “What’s More Beneficial, AI, or Stakeholder Analysis?”
The advances in artificial intelligence are creating a lot of buzz these days, with the launch of several image creation software tools and ChatGPT. It reminds me of one of my first Artificial Intelligence projects from 2017. In this project, the AI algorithm was able to read a PDF, extract important information and convert it into metadata, which is data stored in a specific and structured way. The model performed well, and the engineering team was excited to turn it on. However, when it came time to install it on the server, the IT infrastructure team denied the installation. The project was killed. We had failed to include all the stakeholders in the project communication.
Stakeholder management is a critical aspect of the success of a project. Managing people in projects that don’t work for you, or worse are your senior leaders, can be challenging. I’ve found that an interest and influence matrix is a good tool that can be used to think through the complexities of managing stakeholders. For each stakeholder, you assess the amount of interest they have in the project, as well as their influence or power over the project. Essentially there are 4 quadrants of the matrix: high interest/ high influence, high interest / low influence, low interest / high influence, and low interest / low influence.
High Interest / High Influence – Work Together
Stakeholders with high interest and high influence have a significant impact over a project’s success. These are the people that need to be engaged. If the person is a peer, then they should be on the project team. If the person is a leader, then they should be involved in the decision-making process in a project. Additionally, when issues or changes arise, it is important to inform the stakeholders. In the event there is an issue, I recommend proposing solutions to show that you’ve thought through it some.
High Interest / Low influence – Keep Informed
The stakeholders in this category may not have high decision-making power, but they are still interested in the project’s outcome. When people are interested in the success of the project, they can be evangelists of the project. It is good to keep their interest by keeping them informed.
Low Interest / High Influence – Keep Satisfied
These are the stakeholders that could be lurking in the corner, waiting to come out and throw up a roadblock. I go out of my way to keep these people satisfied by leaning into what I believe are their biggest concerns. Don’t hide anything from them and when you communicate, be sure it is concise.
Low Interest / low Influence – Monitor
The low interest and low influence stakeholders have little interest and should be communicated with sparingly. However, it is good to see if they have moved into a different quadrant. Sometimes their reality changes and they either become interested or suddenly have more power.
Once you’ve assessed the stakeholders, you can create a communication plan accordingly. A communication plan may include meetings, email updates, newsletters, and direct conversation.
Here are some best practices with meetings:
For the high interest / high influence quadrant, I hold a core team meeting on a regular basis that fits the timeline of the project. For projects that span 6 months or more, I try to meet on a bi-weekly basis. For shorter projects or software related projects, I meet more frequently. In these meetings, we review the project plan, discuss proposed solutions to issues and risks, as well as assign and follow up on tasks. With the leadership team, I hold meetings less frequently than the core team meeting. In addition to the content that comes out of the core team meeting, highlight areas that require decisions or escalations. In these sessions, it is valuable to create a standard template that can cover all the topics and use it consistently.
I invite the Low Interest / High Influence stakeholders to the core team and leadership meetings. While there is a cover your behind element to it, I believe it is best to be inclusive of this group. During the meetings, lean into the concerns this group of stakeholders may have. Not only will you drive engagement, but you’ll establish credibility as well.
For the High Interest / Low Influence stakeholders, I prefer to copy them on the meeting minutes and inform them of project status on a more informal basis. Water cooler talk, or an impromptu message through the companies chat is an effective way to keep people informed without taking too much of their time.
Assessing each of the stakeholders for their interest and influence can be useful to dissect the complexity that comes with managing different people in a project. By putting people into the 4 categories and creating a communication plan that aligns with the category, you’re sure to offset risks and alleviate challenges caused by people being surprised.
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Operating a Business in the “Learning Space.”
Operating a Business in the “Learning Space.”
For the week’s blog on Lifelong Learning, our Founder Ron Slee addresses the topic of operating a business in the “Learning Space.”
Our backgrounds, Caroline and I, are in education. More specifically in Classroom Face-to-Face Teaching. As teachers we are concerned with our students and their growth and learning in the specific subjects that we are teaching. We have tests, quizzes, and discussion groups to help us in tracking the learning levels and growth of each student. And, please, never forget that all of these different aspects of teaching allow us to understand what is working and what is not. Many people overlook that aspect of tests and report cards.
In the e-learning world there are many more challenges in the creation of products that will help in employee development. The first question we must ask ourselves is “does our current offering, the assessments, classes and lectures match what the market needs?” This is an ongoing challenge as the market is constantly changing. The question becomes “are we delivering the proper learning products to the proper people in a manner that they find interesting and productive?”
Of course, we have to first define our purpose which with us is very straightforward “We want to assist people in the identification of their individual potential.” However, as you will no doubt realize, that is a challenge all by itself. We also add that our goal goes further in that we want to offer products and services that allow each of the interested people to realize that potential.
That meant that we had to identify the specific aspect of the employee population that we could help with the most. Our conclusion was that we wanted to touch everyone who led people and everyone who interacted with customers or supported people who did interact with customers. That covers nearly everyone in the product support disciplines, the distribution channel, in the capital goods industry. We recognized that although there is different jargon and some different practices that most of the capital goods industries needed similar things. Construction, Agricultural, Light Industrial, Material Handling, Engine, On Highway Truck and Trailer, Marine are some of the industries we are focused on today.
We have a lot of operational experience in these industries and we have multiplied that experience with our large group of Contributors who contribute to our market with blog posts and podcasts and assist in our newsletters. These Contributors, all forty eight of them, have deep understanding of all aspects of the operations of dealers and distributors.
One of our challenges is to bring our product to the market. It is a rather daunting task to attempt to cover all of these companies by ourselves. In order to penetrate this huge market worldwide we have created a smaller group of specialists to help us. They are aimed at educators, the industry associations, the manufacturers of the equipment as well as influential dealers and distributors.
We first communicated directly with industry associations. This is, of course, where I was first teaching in the distribution channel, with the Associated Equipment Distributors (AED). I personally did all of their parts and service operational training from the early 1990’s through 2015. We did Parts Management, Service Management, Product Support Selling and Parts and Service Marketing training. We also provide training services to manufacturers, in some cases worldwide. Companies such as Caterpillar, Deere, Komatsu, Volvo, Ditch Witch and Vermeer to name a few. I also was involved in many industries convention and annual meetings.
We recognized that we need to have a community of influencers.
We were very fortunate to have the help of Steve Johnson. Steve, until he retired was the Vice President of the AED Foundation. This foundation was the area of training and employee development for the association. Steve has been in touch with a large number of schools across the US and Canada establishing, what he calls, Centers of Excellence. These are the schools that he has selected to represent Learning Without Scars across Canada and the United States of America. We are extremely excited about this aspect of our business.
We have established two streams of learning products: one for academic credit and the other for workforce development. For the academic credit stream, we have created classes that will earn seven academic credits (that is fourteen classes as two of our classes earn an academic credit). For the workforce development stream, we have one hundred and eight classes; thirty-six for the parts business, thirty-six for the selling and marketing businesses, and thirty-six for the service business. We also have eighteen job function skills assessments for the workforce development stream. We are currently working with university professors to create a selection of Lecture Series. We hope to have the Lecture Service earning Academic Credits as well. There is a lot of work involved and a lot of effort put in by a lot of people. This is not an easy thing to get done.
One of the challenges for industry is being able to identify the individuals who are the best fit to help companies succeed in their businesses. Universities do this will various tests, such as the Executive Function Test. Businesses do this with various personality profiles such as Briggs Meyers, Personalysis, Caliper and many others. Associations do this with their individual “certification” programs. Manufacturers do this with their technician training and certifications.
As an Accredited Provider with IACET, The International Accreditors of Continuing Education and Training. We are the only ones in the world with this accreditation. We are going to be pursuing further accreditations this year to make our products even more unique to the marketplace.
I hope this gives you a more complete understanding of the “business” we have been building for the parts thirty plus years. I would like to extend my thanks to all of the students, the more than twenty-five thousand of you, that we have had in our classes all around the world. I sincerely mean it when I tell you that this would not have been possible without the contributions that each and every one of you have made I the classrooms with me. Thank you all so very much.
The Time is Now.
Did you enjoy this blog? Read more great blog posts here.
For our course lists, please click here.
A Huge Thank You!
A Huge Thank You!
Shifting things to an attitude of gratitude, our Founder Ron Slee offers a huge thank you to all of our contributors for their incredible contributions.
Many years ago, I started writing a Friday Filosophy as a communications tool. It predated our Learning Without Scars LLC startup in Hawaii. I had several different people expressing an interest in contributing their thinking to the mix.
That got me thinking.
I wondered if I could interest people that I viewed as forward thinking in our industry and have them “pay it forward.” I call them Thought Leaders, Experienced Executives and Revolutionary (Radical) Reformers.
As a result of a major redesign of our website several years ago we added two categories; Colleagues and Contributors. The Colleagues are the people and businesses that we regularly do business with or are in regular communication. The Contributors were those individuals who were willing to share their wisdom.
I have been overwhelmed, to be sure, with the quality of people that have stepped forward and the talent that they bring to us. We have some very educated and accomplished people in this group. I am hoping that this collage that we have included here will allow you in one place to see this wonderful group of people.
The Time is Now.
Friday Filosophy v.02.24.2023
Friday Filosophy v.02.24.2023
To close out February’s Friday Filosophy, Ron Slee shares quotes and words of wisdom from the melancholy Lord Byron. Please read on for Friday Filosophy v.02.24.2023.
George Gordon Byron, 6th Baron Byron FRS (22 January 1788 – 19 April 1824), known simply as Lord Byron, was an English romantic poet and peer. He was one of the leading figures of the Romantic movement, and has been regarded as among the greatest of English poets. Among his best-known works are the lengthy narratives Don Juan and Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage; many of his shorter lyrics in Hebrew Melodies also became popular.
Byron was educated at Trinity College, Cambridge, later travelling extensively across Europe to places such as Italy, where he lived for seven years in Venice, Ravenna, and Pisa after he was forced to flee England due to lynching threats.[7] During his stay in Italy, he frequently visited his friend and fellow poet Percy Bysshe Shelley.[8] Later in life Byron joined the Greek War of Independence fighting the Ottoman Empire and died leading a campaign during that war, for which Greeks revere him as a folk hero.[9] He died in 1824 at the age of 36 from a fever contracted after the First and Second Sieges of Missolonghi.
His only legitimate child, Ada Lovelace, was a founding figure in the field of computer programming based on her notes for Charles Babbage‘s Analytical Engine. Byron’s extramarital children include Allegra Byron, who died in childhood, and possibly Elizabeth Medora Leigh, daughter of his half-sister Augusta Leigh. Byron received his early formal education at Aberdeen Grammar School in 1798 until his move back to England as a 10-year-old. In August 1799 he entered the school of Dr. William Glennie, in Dulwich. Placed under the care of a Dr. Bailey, he was encouraged to exercise in moderation but could not restrain himself from “violent” bouts in an attempt to overcompensate for his deformed foot. His mother interfered with his studies, often withdrawing him from school, with the result that he lacked discipline, and his classical studies were neglected.
In 1801, he was sent to Harrow School, where he remained until July 1805. An undistinguished student and an unskilled cricketer, he did represent the school during the very first Eton v Harrow cricket match at Lord’s in 1805.
His lack of moderation was not restricted to physical exercise. Byron fell in love with Mary Chaworth, whom he met while at school, and she was the reason he refused to return to Harrow in September 1803. His mother wrote, “He has no indisposition that I know of but love, desperate love, the worst of all maladies in my opinion. In short, the boy is distractedly in love with Miss Chaworth. “In Byron’s later memoirs, “Mary Chaworth is portrayed as the first object of his adult sexual feelings.”
Byron finally returned in January 1804, to a more settled period, which saw the formation of a circle of emotional involvements with other Harrow boys, which he recalled with great vividness: “My school friendships were with me passions (for I was always violent)”. The most enduring of those was with John FitzGibbon, 2nd Earl of Clare—four years Byron’s junior—whom he was to meet unexpectedly many years later in Italy (1821). His nostalgic poems about his Harrow friendships, Childish Recollections (1806), express a prescient “consciousness of sexual differences that may in the end make England untenable to him.”[ Letters to Byron in the John Murray archive contain evidence of a previously unremarked if short-lived romantic relationship with a younger boy at Harrow, John Thomas Claridge.
The following autumn, he entered Trinity College, Cambridge, where he met and formed a close friendship with the younger John Edleston. About his “protégé” he wrote, “He has been my almost constant associate since October 1805, when I entered Trinity College. His voice first attracted my attention, his countenance fixed it, and his manners attached me to him forever.” Byron composed Thyrza, a series of elegies, in his memory. In later years, he described the affair as “a violent, though pure love and passion”. This statement, however, needs to be read in the context of hardening public attitudes toward homosexuality in England and the severe sanctions (including public hanging) against convicted or even suspected offenders. The liaison, on the other hand, may well have been “pure” out of respect for Edleston’s innocence, in contrast to the (probably) more sexually overt relations experienced at Harrow School. The poem “The Cornelian” was written about the cornelian that Byron received from Edleston.
Byron spent three years at Trinity College, engaging in sexual escapades, boxing, horse riding, and gambling. While at Cambridge, he also formed lifelong friendships with men such as John Cam Hobhouse, who initiated him into the Cambridge Whig Club, which endorsed liberal politics, and Francis Hodgson, a Fellow at King’s College, with whom he corresponded on literary and other matters until the end of his life.
The Time is Now.
Did you enjoy this blog? Read more great blog posts here.
For our course lists, please click here.
Coaches Corner v.02.23.2023
Coaches Corner v.02.23.2023
Guest writer and Coach Floyd Jerkins addresses behavioral sales metrics for coaching equipment industry sales teams for Coaches Corner v.02.23.2023.
Every dealership organization is at a different place in time with the diagnosis of their sales teams and processes. The size of complex and level of operational sophistication are factors. Many times, it’s a location issue more than overall company-wide so that requires custom solutions. So, maybe this article is timely and you’re ready to look deeper into how to make real progress in the sales department.
Professional Sales Management and Salespeople
Great salespeople are great salespeople, and in the equipment industry it’s no different than other industries. There are particular aspects unique to every industry due to a product’s life cycle, style of customers and personalities, buying patterns, and market conditions. And the best salespeople know they have to understand these industry specific characteristics to succeed, but there is more. When you learn to sell, you can sell anything. Yea, I know, I know, but it’s true.
Being a professional sales manager or salesperson in the equipment industry isn’t for everyone. There are real superstars doing this work every day and many of them make it look easy. They have a natural and personal approach that gets the job done. Others have tried and failed. Many linger on with average performance. Yet, owners who sell often do not follow the system they expect their salespeople to follow or they have a perceived top producer that no one can touch.
There are typically high and low performers when you have a large sales team. Improving the performance metrics of sales managers and salespeople can be challenging to establish what particular actions need to be taken.
Building a sales team of all superstars is a great plan, but not always realistic or practical. In my experience, sales management and sales teams usually have a mixture of age and talent with varying skill sets and competency levels.
A Sales Managers Rally Cry – To Sell More, Talk to More People
To sell more, talking to more people always seems to be at the top of the list of things to do. Still, if a salesperson talks to a lot of people and prices a lot of people but doesn’t have a good measured closing ratio, it makes me wonder how effective they are and whether they should be allowed to keep talking to your customers. When a sales manager influences the sales team with a whip and chain or talks more about the problems than the solutions, is that the most effective leadership style to use in today’s business climate? I don’t think so.
The traditional metrics for sales success include new and used margins, sales volume, new and used turns, and a mixture of others. To be an excellent asset manager, you must know these metrics and how to positively influence their outcomes.
Performance Metrics Created Before & After the Sale
Like many traditional metrics, margins, turns, and other sales department indicators are created after a unit is sold. The efficiency of your booking and accounting practices determines when the sale appears in a statement. That could be anywhere from one week to sixty days past when the actual sale was made. Once the numbers are current, you can assess what’s going on. If you’ve followed my articles about this, you know where I am headed.
Let me ask a few questions:
Perhaps you took a few seconds and thought about your answers. I appreciate the effort. Now, consider your answers and what you know and don’t know.
“The goal is to coach performance in the areas that help salespeople become more effective with real-time data. Becoming more effective in sales and marketing your business requires a deep understanding of your customer base so you can focus the sales and marketing team on what matters the most.”
Behavioral Customer Segmentation
The old saying is you can’t improve something unless you measure it. One of the first principles of process improvement is as a process evolves make sure you are measuring the right things.
You probably already know the customer by machine or product sold, sales volume, and parts and service sales, so tracking this kind of customer segmentation can reveal even more real time data. Even a basic CRM system can track these customer categories.
Total Customers
Customer Categories
New Customer– This customer has never been to, called, or emailed your business before.
Repeat Customer– This is a customer who has bought from you before. Many companies have “orphan owners.”
Referral Customer– This is a customer who another customer referred to your business or the salesperson.
New Business– This customer is someone you meet at the gas station or a social event. A brief conversation in almost any social situation generates new leads.
The sale is the end result of all the activities performed by a salesperson. By coaching performance on these sales activities that happen before and during the sales process, we can naturally increase a salespersons effectiveness.
When you measure these you learn a lot about how your sales mix is made up, how effective sales and front-line people are in each category, and even how well your marketing is doing. It also speeds up the learning curves. If you don’t know these, you are at the end of the sales cycle making decisions. When you are looking at unit sales, you are best guessing how effective your sales and marketing efforts are.
A Behavioral Sales Mix- BSM
Each salesperson should log every Customer Contact interaction each day. To get buy-in, a sales manager communicates with the sales team to create the “rules of logging” they’ll follow. For example, if the salesperson is at the parts counter talking with Joe Customer and he asks how much that used machine is, that should be logged. Each person inputting into the system should understand what the code means when they log it. GIGO- garbage in, garbage out.
Salespeople shouldn’t be allowed to post at their discretion, and that’s part of the rules created in the early stages of implementation. You don’t allow your accounting staff to post credits however they like, nor do you allow technicians not to record their time. Salespeople should be required to a certain standard of recording their day-to-day activities. Its good business.
It’s essential to know how many Closes to Face-to-Face Contacts there are in the same time period. This establishes one of the fundamental Closing Ratios for performance improvement.
By tracking these customer categories and how many face-to-face contacts by salesperson and how many closes by salesperson, you are ready to create a new view of your sales mix. Stay tuned, next month’s article will be on the analysis of these metrics.
Did you enjoy this blog? Read more great blog posts here.
For our course lists, please click here.
Does your team have a relationship with your product?
Does your team have a relationship with your product?
Does your team have a relationship with your product? If not, don’t you think they should? Guest writer Isaac Rollor brings back the personal side of service with this week’s blog post.
Boeing recently delivered the last 747 aircraft. Boeing coined the name “Queen of these skies” for this plane. It’s a fitting nick name, this plane has allowed millions of people worldwide to fly at an affordable price, assisted NASA missions, humanitarian relief efforts and many more great accomplishments. The final delivery of the last 747 to be produced was a momentous occasion. A national news network streamed the delivery on live TV. It was a legitimate ceremony with flags and speeches and honorable mentions. As I watched this spectacle, I heard another onlooker make a comment “What’s the big deal? It’s just a plane.”
This comment was surprising to me, how could someone not understand how many engineers worked long days to perfect the design of this plane? How could someone not understand the many hours technical troubleshooting teams worked to keep this fleet of planes in the sky? How could someone not realize that there are thousands of aircraft mechanics, pilots, and a legion of support personnel who have a personal relationship with this product?
As I thought more deeply about this impossibly insensitive comment, I realized that some people don’t have relationships with products, most professionals will never have an actual relationship with any product. As a technical trainer for many years, I built relationships with Dozers, Loaders, Excavators and Trucks. Maybe this sounds silly but I don’t think I am alone in this feeling. I knew the products so well that I could troubleshoot and fix them when it was not operating correctly. I could teach others about the product, I could write articles about these products, I could operate these products and see the results of my machine’s labor at the end of the day. There were many other technical people that I worked with who felt a strong connection to the products our OEM was building. We even identified ourselves as “The dozer guy” The Truck guy” or the “Excavator guy” based on our expertise. Our professional identity was directly related to a product or several products.
Over the years I have spoken to equipment buyers who told me that their final decision came down to product support and total cost of ownership. I know from experience that the best product support can only be delivered when your team has a relationship with the product you sell. A team whose identity is attached to the success of a product will work tirelessly to see it succeed. Think about this, if your flagship product was being retired from production, what would your team think and say about this?
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Has Anyone Been Thanked Too Much?
Has Anyone Been Thanked Too Much?
This week, guest writer Ross Atkinson brings up an excellent question about gratitude and the ways in which we interact with others: Has Anyone Been Thanked Too Much?
Thank you! Thank you for reading this blog. Thank you for taking advantage of the education offered through Learning Without Scars.
Why is it so difficult for people to say these two words? This is one of many phrases that someone can use to express their gratitude and make the customer feel appreciated. This can be the difference between them doing future business with you or not.
“Thank you for your business. Appreciate you!”
With such an important phrase at one’s disposal, why don’t we hear it said more?
Since retiring, one of my main focuses has been leading a local trails organization. We maintain ~40 kilometers or 25 miles of trails and rely on volunteers to get all the work accomplished. These are people who give freely of their time and ask nothing in return. Having accumulated more the 3,000 volunteer hours in the last 5 years, I have said “thank you” a lot. Without them and their unselfish act of kindness, we would not exist.
In your business, without your customers, you wouldn’t exist either. The customer came to you with an expectation that you could meet their needs. You too have an expectation that the customer should be willing to trust you to take care of their needs and ultimately relinquish their hard-earned money to get what they are looking for. And, of course, the expectation is that you will do this in the most professional manner and with the skill of a well-trained, seasoned veteran.
So why is it so difficult to finish the “transaction” by saying those two words? And say it with the sincerity that lets them know their business is greatly appreciated and that you are here to help them with their future needs?
As in John Andersen’s recent blog “How is your customer service….Meh?”, a simple phrase like “Come back again soon.” and leaving a ‘gesture of appreciation’ has a lasting impression and is a wonderful way of saying thank you and showing that you care.
Wouldn’t you like to receive this kind of appreciation? And when you make that follow up call to ensure that everything worked out okay, thank your customer again and make sure to ask if there is anything that you can do next time to make their experience better.
When you get comfortable saying this to your customers, try it with your employees and coworkers. You might be surprised at what will come of it.
Thank you!
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Learning Management Software (LMS) is a Critical Part in eLearning
Learning Management Software (LMS) is a Critical Part in eLearning
For this week’s blog post on Lifelong Learning our Founder, Ron Slee, shares the ways in which Learning Management Software (LMS) is a Critical Part in eLearning.
Building a series of learning products for academic credit and workforce development is our foundational responsibility. We attempt to keep up with the rapid pace of changes taking place in the educational world. That is keeping us very busy. From developing audio tracks to go with our recommended reading to closed captioning on our film clips and videos. From adapting to the class requirements for face-face time and homework to ensuring that adult education is not overpowering employees. We are remarkably busy. Without a Learning Management Software tool we would be at a serious disadvantage.
Many of you know that one of my educational foundations was Computer Science. I ran a couple of “Data Processing” department for equipment dealers. I also ran a software business when we first arrived in the US that served the equipment dealer world. So I was at one time quite familiar with how everything worked and what was required to use to get the best results. How that world has changed. It got to the point in the early 1990’s that I finally threw my hands up in the air and said that I would have to be dependent on professionals in certain aspects of the technology world that was coming out fast and furious. That is clearly the case with Learning Management Software. Our Job Function Skills Assessments, Subject Specific Classes and Lectures all need to have a platform which would allow us to offer our products to the marketplace.
If in our market we are serving the students at vocational and technical schools or even students enrolled in community colleges or public and private universities, time would not be so much of an element. The US Department of Education says that there needs to be two hours of homework for every hour of face-to-face earning. Many states have differing standards. As an Approved Supplier of IACET we have to have ten hours of learning to earn one CEU (Continuing Education Units). At Learning Without Scars (LWS) we offer academic credit classes to the schools and also to employees already in the workforce.
For the vocational schools our classes are built to provide six and a half hours of face-to-face learning and thirteen hours of homework. In this way two of our classes earn academic credits across most of the US. These classes are all for our “Centers of Excellence.” The CoE is a school that has agreed to take on the responsibility for a specific geography in the country. We aim to have ten in the US and three in Canada by year end 2023. Our CoE’s will have fourteen classes for the parts business and fourteen classes for the service business. Seven academic credits will be available at each of these CoE’s.
For workforce development (WD) we have adjusted our classes as well to allow the same qualification for our classes. In this manner we are working towards having two classes earning an academic credit. This will allow all employees in the workforce to earn at a similar level to the vocational schools.
There are also significant changes in the attitudes and outlook of employees in the workforce. The role of the leader, the lead hands and foremen, the managers, supervisors and executives is more important that seemingly ever before. Litmos, our LMS provider, has indicated that 86% of employees would change jobs if the new job offered more opportunities for development. 45% of employees do not believe that their employer promotes a healthy work-life balance. Sixty-six percent of professionals said that there isn’t much support for those wishing to take on leadership roles.
It has become quite clear that the world is changing too fast for business to be able to keep up and develop their own training programs. The classes that many are taking today will be out-of-date by the time they complete them. That is a serious problem. Each of our classes, whether it be for Centers of Excellence or Workforce Development, ends with surveys for our students to let us know what they liked, what they didn’t like, what they felt was missing, and many other important comments for us. We take these comments seriously. We also receive statistical reporting on answers to our quizzes for reading lists, learning segments or homework. In this manner we are able to ensure that the homework is in fact completed. Many schools and businesses recognize that if they can obtain a class without having to build it themselves that they can better focus on their core requirement. That is true with schools as well. Teaching is a difficult profession. But ask any adult who their teachers were in grade school, or middle school, or even high school and they will be able to talk about them. Most cannot tell who was the Speaker of House of Representatives when they were in school. Who is more important? In my mind their teachers are more important.
At LWS we have built classes that we believe you will want to take. You can take them everywhere you are as long as you have a computer, tablet, laptop, or cell phone and an internet connection. We have tried to keep the classes as short as we can as long as they communicate and transfer the learning that is required. We are very pleased with how we have done over the past two years. We have made many changes and taken large strides in our purpose of helping people both professionally and personally identify and then realize their potential.
We extend to you our hand when you enroll and complete our learning products. Welcome Aboard.
The Time is Now.
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Friday Filosophy v.02.17.2023
Friday Filosophy v.02.17.2023
Friday Filosophy v.02.17.2023 offers quotes and words of wisdom from the English Romantic poet William Wordsworth.
William Wordsworth (7 April 1770 – 23 April 1850) was an English Romantic poet who, with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, helped to launch the Romantic Age in English literature with their joint publication Lyrical Ballads (1798). Wordsworth’s magnum opus is generally considered to be The Prelude, a semi-autobiographical poem of his early years that he revised and expanded a number of times. It was posthumously titled and published by his wife in the year of his death, before which it was known as “the poem to Coleridge”. Wordsworth was Poet Laureate from 1843 until his death from pleurisy on 23 April 1850.
Wordsworth was taught to read by his mother and attended, first, a tiny school of low quality in Cockermouth, then a school in Penrith for the children of upper-class families, where he was taught by Ann Birkett, who insisted on instilling in her students traditions that included pursuing both scholarly and local activities, especially the festivals around Easter, May Day and Shrove Tuesday. Wordsworth was taught both the Bible and the Spectator, but little else. It was at the school in Penrith that he met the Hutchinson’s, including Mary, who later became his wife.
After the death of Wordsworth’s mother, in 1778, his father sent him to Hawkshead Grammar School in Lancashire (now in Cumbria) and sent Dorothy to live with relatives in Yorkshire. She and William did not meet again for nine years.
Wordsworth made his debut as a writer in 1787 when he published a sonnet in The European Magazine. That same year he began attending St John’s College, Cambridge. He received his BA degree in 1791. He returned to Hawkshead for the first two summers of his time at Cambridge, and often spent later holidays on walking tours, visiting places famous for the beauty of their landscape. In 1790 he went on a walking tour of Europe, during which he toured the Alps extensively, and visited nearby areas of France, Switzerland, and Italy. Some modern critics suggest that there was a decline in his work beginning around the mid-1810s, perhaps because most of the concerns that characterized his early poems (loss, death, endurance, separation, and abandonment) had been resolved in his writings and his life. By 1820, he was enjoying considerable success accompanying a reversal in the contemporary critical opinion of his earlier works.
Wordsworth’s youthful political radicalism, unlike Coleridge’s, never led him to rebel against his religious upbringing. He remarked in 1812 that he was willing to shed his blood for the established Church of England, reflected in his Ecclesiastical Sketches of 1822. This religious conservatism also colors The Excursion (1814), a long poem that became extremely popular during the nineteenth century. It features three central characters: the Wanderer; the Solitary, who has experienced the hopes and miseries of the French Revolution; and the Pastor, who dominates the last third of the poem.
Such kind of conversational tone persists all through the poetic journey of the poet, that positions him as a man in the society who speaks to the purpose of communion with the very common mass of the society. Again; “Preface to Lyrical Ballads” is the evidence where the poet expresses why he is writing and what he is writing and what purpose it will serve to humanity.
Wordsworth remained a formidable presence in his later years. In 1837, the Scottish poet and playwright Joanna Baillie reflected on her long acquaintance with Wordsworth. “He looks like a man that one must not speak to unless one has some sensible thing to say. However, he does occasionally converse cheerfully & well; and when one knows how benevolent & excellent he is, it disposes one to be very pleased with him.” William Wordsworth died at home at Rydal Mount from an aggravated case of pleurisy on 23 April 1850, and was buried at St Oswald’s Church, Grasmere. His widow, Mary, published his lengthy autobiographical “Poem to Coleridge” as The Prelude several months after his death. Though it failed to interest people at the time, it has since come to be widely recognized as his masterpiece.
The Time is Now
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